The Surrendered

“You eat,” she said. She was sitting up now, her narrow shoulders pinched forward, making her seem slighter still, folded in, like she was an image in the crease of a book. “I just want a taste anyway.”

“You ought to go first, then.”

He handed her a scant spoonful of it, its consistency more like a soup than a stew. She took it, chewing tentatively, and then had another, two large full spoons. She rapped the spoon on the edge of the pot and offered it to him.

“You keep going,” he said.

“We can share.”

“You better eat while you want to,” he said. Then he added, “While you can.”

She nodded, and had two more spoonfuls, though the final one seemed to stick in her throat. He had opened a bottle of the homemade wine, leaving the equivalent of fifty dollars in lire for it and the rest of the things he had opened, from the money she had had him change in Livorno. In fact she’d given him her bankroll to hold, twelve thousand dollars or so in traveler’s checks and cash, vastly more money than he’d ever seen at once. But he’d never cared about money and he would have likely traded a good deal of it for a corkscrew, if the cottage hadn’t had one. (Though he’d smashed open the tops of bottles before.) He found one, though, and his hands were calmed by the familiar heft of the bottle, and in one smooth continuous action he pulled the cork and brought it to his lips. The wine wasn’t wine at all but a very strong, clear brandy, harsh and chemical, like dry-cleaning fluid might taste, but it was right enough; he drank nearly a third of it in one slug. He sensed her watching him with hooded eyes, undoubtedly wondering whether he was that much better off than she.

“You didn’t drink so much back then,” she said.

“You wouldn’t have seen me.”

“I did,” she said. “I sometimes followed you. You didn’t know, but I spied on you.”

He took another long slug and tried not to think of what she might have witnessed, though not because it wouldn’t have been right for a young girl; he was simply shielding himself, for as much as the memory of Sylvie Ta

June said, “I remember, just before the end, when Reverend Ta

“Where was I?”

“You were gone for the day,” she said. “Maybe you had gone to the base, for supplies. It was morning and she was sitting in the patch of grass behind their cottage. She had missed breakfast again, and I had come to sweep and clean. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair was messy and he was standing over her, so tall and high. He didn’t shout. But for some reason I was sure he was going to strike her. I had his glass paperweight in my hand and I was ready to hit him, if I had to. Of course he didn’t.”

“He wasn’t like that,” Hector said.

“No, he wasn’t,” June answered. “But he kept telling her how ashamed he was. How she was an embarrassment to herself, and to him. She just sat there, taking it. I was so angry.”

How easily Hector could see June, more than thirty years removed, wielding some sharp crystal. And then Sylvie, in a cloak of miserable penitence that she was all too ready to don. Ta

“When you were spying on us. Were you in the storeroom?”

“Yes.”

His room was on the end of a long, low wood-framed building that was roofed with sheets of corrugated tin. It was a room much like this one, though half its size, with a single cot and a rusted metal shelf for his things but no window onto the dirt courtyard. It was never meant for habitation. Next to it was a general storeroom for the orphanage-study books and pencils, some ca

“We never knew.”

“I was careful to be quiet.”

“How many times were you there?”

“I don’t know.”

He took a long drink, and then another. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” she said. But her eyes were enlivened, gleaming brightly against her sallow face, the last pools in a forsaken plain. “After she told me I couldn’t work in the house anymore, I wanted to hate her. But then she started seeing you and I could see a way, again.”

“A way to what?”

“To being with her always. Isn’t that what you wanted, too?”

He didn’t answer, because of course it was true. Yet at the time he didn’t quite know it-he was too brutal and stupid, just a rig of flesh that selfishly craved and rebelled. He didn’t understand then how deeply he needed her, that he loved not just her sharp wants and carnality but how tightly bound up those were with her decency and beauty and goodness; she was exalted and flawed, someone who required as much grace and succor as she herself readily offered, someone both he and June desperately needed, a mother and a lover and a kind of child, too. That first time they made love, when she opened the back door of the cottage for him, she had fallen upon him as if she’d thrown herself from a parapet, with the grave force of both will and surrender. She kissed him, bit him, wanted his fingers inside every part of her. She was more than thirty years gone now, though it could be a mere day, and he felt his heart suddenly unstitch, the wire twine instantly rusting, falling away, to reveal again the cold box, the great dark underworld of his guilt.

“I’m so tired,” June said. She had a hand on her belly, not quite holding it, the way a pregnant woman might unconsciously take her own measure. She lay back down and slowly closed her eyes. With a long swig Hector finished the first bottle, its liquor still burning his throat. He had just opened the other bottle when she said, “I’ll sleep a little now.”

“Okay.”

“Aren’t you going to eat?”

“No,” he said. He was already drinking deeply again, a broad, dry delta. “Maybe later.”

“Will you stay here with me?”

“Where else would I go?”

“Just stay.”

He nodded to her and waited until her breathing grew steady and more audible. He had become her sitter now. Like a child, she was acting as if his remaining within the scope of her reach and sight would somehow diminish his power or will to leave. And yet now her insistence seemed strangely valid, for he thought he needed to step outside the cottage to determine what he would do. In fact, in Livorno he had, at least temporarily, deserted her; for two hours he sat in the main station, waiting for the next train to Rome, until he finally returned to their room at the hotel and found her unable to get out of the tub. She’d been showering and had reached up to adjust the sprayer and lost her balance, slipping and falling hard on her side and back. Though she was in pain, nothing, miraculously, was broken-a folded towel on the tub edge had softened the impact-and the distress of the situation allowed them to avoid the question of where he had been. Her nakedness was unsettling, but only to Hector; she didn’t try at all to cover herself, either immediately or after he lifted her up, merely sitting on the bidet in a miserable daze. Her breasts were shrunken and lined and her scarred belly was partly distended to a shine, and the patch of hair between her legs, a thick, dark broom, was the sole indication that she was not even fifty years old. He had offered her the towel but she only held it in her hands, weakly wringing it, dabbing it against her face as if it were a precious furl of cloth.